Jeff is back in town and back in action here at the lab. He's now working on the NTPCkr/RFI stuff (which has been languishing due to lack of effort and the science database throughput woes which I've been alluding to lately).

As predicted, I did finally get the astropulse version of the splitter to compile (just some library/linking bugs that had to be hunted down and exterminated). So astropulse workunits using the software radar blanking system are going out! Meanwhile, I hit some more management snags with the multibeam stuff - I'm trying to blank/split really old files which we recorded before we had all the kinks worked out. Long story short, some files I spent a lot of time (days) pulling up from our archives and doing the first stages of radar analysis are unsplittable. Darn. I was hoping to just get beyond the dearth of data in the nick of time, but it looks like I got to pull more files up from the archives, and we'll run a bit dry before they are splittable.

Today is a particularly windy day, which means it's fairly clear. Here's a picture taken from my iPhone looking out from the lab patio onto the Bay. That the Lawrence Hall of science directly below me, then downtown Berkeley, then the Bay itself, then San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Marin Headlands in the distance. The detail isn't so great, so you can't see that the Bay Bridge is completely devoid of cars right now (it's shut down due to technically difficulties), which is quite rare and quite odd.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Unless I'm misunderstanding, the blanking process basically gives us a second crunch run of 7 months of data from 2006 and 4 months of data from 2007.

So my question is, once we've run thru those tapes (which might not take all that long given present burn rates), do these new software blanking functions have future uses (since Arecibo is presently hardware blanked). ex: Can you use this in a modified form to re-purpose other kinds of data feeds from other radio telescopes?

PS: Feel free to give a quick Cpt Pike response, one iPhone pic for Yes, two iPhone pics for no.

The current burn rate is roughly 2-3 "tapes" a day (really files but we still call them tapes too), and we have about 500 of these to send through the software blanker pipeline (some already processed, i.e. a "second crunch" like you state).

Meanwhile, ALFA will be back on line next week, so we'll have plenty of data again to chew on before too long - it's just low now as ALFA has been off for a month and the software blanker pipeline is slow to get revved up.

Nevertheless, we'll probably just software blank *ALL* data from now on as it seems like it works a lot better. I should really optimize the algorithm - it's way too slow now and I know I can speed it up. But to answer your question we may want to publish this somehow to other Arecibo-related projects as it cleans up a bunch of garbage the hardware blanker misses.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, the blanking process basically gives us a second crunch run of 7 months of data from 2006 and 4 months of data from 2007.

So my question is, once we've run thru those tapes (which might not take all that long given present burn rates), do these new software blanking functions have future uses (since Arecibo is presently hardware blanked). ex: Can you use this in a modified form to re-purpose other kinds of data feeds from other radio telescopes?

- Matt
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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

always good news Matt. I see you've got some more newly blanked WUs running in the system. I haven't got one yet but it's good to see them coming out. Hopefully it will be enough to hold us over till ALFA gets up and running again.

I bet any other Arecibo-related projects will eat this software up. It should be really great for any type of project running their data. Good luck on the optimizing, we need as much work as you can throw at us. :-)
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It would be free (w/proper credit to the dev), just the way the community works.

If we got charged back for reasonable costs of piggy backing at Arecibo, S@H would have shuttered years ago. Plus, if this helps clean up some other science, then that science won't need to re-survey thus S@H likely benefits indirectly by a greater variety of sky points).

I was kind of hoping other radio telescopes had similar blanking woes thus we could get welcome invitations to meaningfully sized sites (ie: Russia's Ratan-600 or the under-construction Chinese FAST).

I was kind of hoping other radio telescopes had similar blanking woes thus we could get welcome invitations to meaningfully sized sites (ie: Russia's Ratan-600 or the under-construction Chinese FAST).

Especially nice if these telescopes can see parts of the sky that Aricebo can't, and the scientists involved reciprocated by agreeing to ship some of their blanked data to Berkeley for splitting into WUs (for appropriately modified client apps).
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Its good to hear optimistic news about the radar blanking software working well. You worked hard on that, it was time well spent, well done Matt.

Matt you live in San Francisco and you probably take the city for granted. But to the rest of the world, San Francisco is a kinda magical place that we see all the time in Hollywood films and TV shows. So its just really cool to see cool photos of where you guys work in Berkeley. The view from the top of that hill is second to none. Wonderful picture Matt, thank you.

Its good to hear optimistic news about the radar blanking software working well. You worked hard on that, it was time well spent, well done Matt.

Matt you live in San Francisco and you probably take the city for granted. But to the rest of the world, San Francisco is a kinda magical place that we see all the time in Hollywood films and TV shows. So its just really cool to see cool photos of where you guys work in Berkeley. The view from the top of that hill is second to none. Wonderful picture Matt, thank you.

Its good to hear optimistic news about the radar blanking software working well. You worked hard on that, it was time well spent, well done Matt.

Matt you live in San Francisco and you probably take the city for granted. But to the rest of the world, San Francisco is a kinda magical place that we see all the time in Hollywood films and TV shows. So its just really cool to see cool photos of where you guys work in Berkeley. The view from the top of that hill is second to none. Wonderful picture Matt, thank you.

Someone mentioned other projects also using Arecibo. Einstien@home also uses Arecibo too as one example. I'd guess there are other projects too.
I never thought about that...
Do you swap tapes with each other (bigger pool), everyone use the same tape data (for different purposes), or are they just different (everyone has their own separate tape data).

Someone mentioned other projects also using Arecibo. Einstien@home also uses Arecibo too as one example. I'd guess there are other projects too.
I never thought about that...
Do you swap tapes with each other (bigger pool), everyone use the same tape data (for different purposes), or are they just different (everyone has their own separate tape data).

I believe that the data is coming from different receivers near the main antenna focus. It is also likely that the data is formatted differently.
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